Artaxerxes I

The institution of programmatic throne-names is well attested in the dynasty, but its application to Artaxerxes I is disputed.^[1] Briant treats his reign as the first attested use, whereas Kuhrt notes that Josephus is the only classical witness to a different personal name and that most editors emend even that notice; Darius II provides the first clear independent attestation.^[2][3] The chosen name, Old Persian Artaxšaça (later R̥ta-xšaça), joins xšaça, 'rule' or 'kingdom', to arta, the Truth or right order that the inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes set against the Lie (see arta and the Lie). Schmitt renders it 'whose rule is through Truth'.^[1] The choice reasserted the ideological programme of the dynasty, and the value of dynastic loyalty, which was welcome after a bloody succession.^[2]

The Greeks gave him a byname that stuck. Latin authors called him Longimanus and the Greeks Makrocheir, 'the Long-handed' or 'Long-armed'. Plutarch reports the flat physical explanation, that his right hand was longer than his left. The grammarian Pollux offered another gloss, 'with a power that extends far', which sits closer to the language of Persian kingship, since reach and far-flung dominion are recurring boasts of the royal inscriptions.^[2] What the sources agree on is the tenor of the portrait: a tall, handsome, mild king. Nepos preserves the court image at its most favourable.

Macrochir is greatly celebrated for a most noble and handsome person, which he rendered still more remarkable by extraordinary bravery in the field; for no one of the Persians was more valorous in action than he.

Cornelius Nepos, On the Kings 1^[4]

Plutarch likewise calls him the most remarkable of the Persian kings for gentleness, and Diodorus stresses the goodwill he won at his accession.^[2] These are the topoi of favourable propaganda, and they should be weighed as such, but they are consistent, and the picture of a reign without the drama of a Xerxes fits the thin, orderly record the documents preserve.

No continuous narrative replaces Herodotus after 465. The surviving Greek accounts concentrate on the western wars and the court, while provincial documents preserve the empire's routine more clearly than the king's own actions.^[2] The Murašû archive and the Egyptian Aramaic dossiers reveal landholding, taxation and provincial government; Ezra and Nehemiah preserve a different, difficult record from Judah.^[1] The reign is therefore known less through a connected royal story than through evidence produced for different purposes. Waters notes that Kuhrt's sourcebook assembles almost all of these scattered texts, but no compilation removes the need to test literary narrative against contemporary documents.^[5]

Xerxes was murdered at the beginning of August 465, cut down in his bedchamber in a palace conspiracy. The plot is the first killing of a reigning Achaemenid since the obscure end of Bardiya, and the ancient accounts agree on its outline while diverging on almost every detail.^[2] The instigator was Artabanus, a Hyrcanian who held high command at court, chief of the bodyguard in Diodorus. He drew in a eunuch of the bedchamber and, in Justin, his own seven sons. Xerxes was killed; then Artabanus turned the succession to his advantage by persuading the youngest surviving son, Artaxerxes, that the murder was the work of the eldest brother, Darius. Darius was put to death protesting his innocence, and Artaxerxes took the throne. When Artabanus then reached for the kingship himself, or was suspected of it, he too was destroyed, in Ctesias through the denunciation of Megabyzus, in Justin and Diodorus by the young king in person.^[2]

The divergences matter, because they show how a court event reached the Greeks. Ctesias, Diodorus and Justin share the murder in the bedroom, the false charge against the innocent brother, and the betrayal and elimination of the plotter, but they distribute the names, motives and numbers differently, and the figures repeat suspiciously from one royal murder to the next: the bedroom, the complicit eunuch, the number seven. Aristotle, discussing the motives that drive men to kill kings, gives a version unlike any of them.

Artapanes conspired against Xerxes and slew him, fearing that he would be accused of hanging Darius against his orders.

Aristotle, Politics 5.10^[2]

Here it is Artabanus who fears the consequence of having killed Darius, the reverse of the standard tale. The multiplicity of versions is itself the evidence: numerous stories of the event were circulating and had made a deep impression, and none can be reconstructed in detail.^[2] One late notice, in the chronographer Africanus, even makes Artabanus a king who reigned seven months. It can be set aside: the Babylonian and Egyptian tablets show Artaxerxes succeeding his father directly, with no usurper recorded, so that whatever violence attended the accession, no rival was ever officially recognised.^[2] What is certain is that the reign began, as the ideology of arta would have it, in a disorder the new king claimed to have set right.

The first challenge came from the east and may also have come from within the family. Ctesias names the rebel satrap as another Artabanus; Briant identifies him, cautiously, with Artaxerxes's brother Hystaspes, whom Diodorus places in Bactria.^[2] Ctesias reports a hard, indecisive battle, won when the wind turned against the Bactrians, after which Bactria submitted.^[2] If the identification is right, this was not the rebellion of a subject land but a dynastic struggle for the crown. Its suppression, together with a purge of satraps hostile to the new king and the promotion of his own friends, confirmed his hold.^[2] Diodorus and Josephus preserve the reorganisation of the provinces at the accession.^[2]

In his own words the king says nothing of any of this. His inscriptions repeat the formulas of his predecessors and place his kingship in an unbroken line.

I am Artaxerxes, great king, king of kings, king of countries, king on this great earth far and wide, son of king Xerxes, son of Darius, the Achaemenid.

Artaxerxes I, A¹Pa^[6]

The genealogy is the whole of the argument. Nothing in the epigraphy admits the murder that cleared his path; the record presents only the legitimate son completing his father's work. That silence is the normal grammar of Achaemenid royal display, and the historian reads the reign in the gap between it and the Greek tales of the bedchamber.

Early in the reign the empire received a remarkable suppliant. Themistocles, the Athenian who had engineered the Greek victory at Salamis and had a price on his head from Xerxes, arrived in Asia Minor a fugitive from his own city and sought out the Great King. Thucydides, who tells the story most soberly, has him write ahead to Artaxerxes 'who had just come to the throne', in a letter that turned the great enmity into a claim on royal gratitude. He presents himself as the man who did the king's house "more harm than any of the Hellenes" during the invasion, harm … "far surpassed by the good that I did him during his retreat", when he claimed to have sent the warning that saved Xerxes and left the bridges standing.^[7]

The defector who had beaten the Persian fleet now offered to serve the king against Greece, and was received, in Thucydides's phrase, to very high consideration such as no Hellene had attained before or since.^[7] He was given the revenues of three cities of the Asian coast to keep him: he was "governor of the district, the king having given him Magnesia, which brought in fifty talents a year, for bread, Lampsacus, which was considered to be the richest wine country, for wine, and Myos for other provisions".^[7]

Whether it was Xerxes or Artaxerxes who received him was already debated in antiquity: Thucydides names Artaxerxes, while Plutarch preserves the version that has him reach Xerxes, and Themistocles may have landed shortly before the old king's death and been received by the new one.^[2] The episode carries a quieter point about the empire. That the king could hand over Magnesia, Lampsacus and Myus as a gift shows that the Persians still held, and had always held, a good number of the coastal towns, whatever the Athenians claimed to have liberated.^[2]

The Aegean war his father had left unfinished ran on into the new reign. Athens, at the head of the Delian League, kept up the pressure on the empire's western edge, and around 466 the Athenian commander Cimon destroyed a Persian fleet and army at the Eurymedon river in southern Anatolia, the aftermath of which belongs to the story of the campaigns that followed Mycale. But the gravest crisis of the reign was in Egypt, which had a long habit of secession and a memory of independence before the Persian conquest. Around 463 a Libyan dynast of the western Delta, Inaros son of Psammetichus, with his headquarters at Marea above Pharos, expelled the Persian tribute-collectors and raised the country against the king. Aware that his own forces were no match for a royal army, he appealed to Athens, then at the height of its naval power, and Athens answered. In Thucydides's compressed notice Inaros "caused a revolt of almost the whole of Egypt from King Artaxerxes, and placing himself at its head, invited the Athenians to his assistance".^[7] An Athenian fleet already operating against Cyprus, two hundred ships strong, broke off and sailed into the Nile. It seized the river and most of Memphis, penning the Persians and their loyal Egyptians in the citadel called the White Castle.^[7] The king's first response failed badly: an army under Achaemenes, Xerxes's brother and the satrap of Egypt, was beaten at Papremis in the Delta and Achaemenes himself was killed.^[2] Artaxerxes then tried diplomacy, sending money to the Peloponnese in the hope of drawing Athens off by opening a front at home, and when that came to nothing he mounted a full campaign under Megabyzus. The relief force broke the blockade of Memphis, drove the Athenians onto an island in the Delta, and after a long siege destroyed them; a relieving squadron sent later was caught and largely annihilated. The expedition had lasted six years, and its end was among the heaviest defeats Athens suffered in the century.^[2]

Seen from the Persian side, the revolt looks smaller than the Athenian disaster it produced. It never spread beyond the Delta: inscriptions dated by Artaxerxes's regnal years continue through the war in Upper Egypt, and the Aramaic papyri of Elephantine show no disturbance.^[2] Nor did the crown try to hold the marsh country by force. It settled instead for a client arrangement of the kind the Persians used elsewhere, keeping the dynasts of the Delta in place on condition of loyalty. Herodotus states the principle as a Persian habit: "the Persians are wont to honour kings' sons; even though kings revolt from them, yet they give back to their sons the sovereign power".^[8] Inaros was crucified, but his son Thannyras was allowed to succeed him, as was Pausiris son of the other marsh king Amyrtaeus, though, as Herodotus adds, none ever did the Persians more harm than Inaros.^[8] The Diodoran narrative that Kuhrt sets out gives the same shape from the Greek side, a rising that flared with the news of Xerxes's death and drew Athens in to its cost.^[3] Egypt was held thereafter by controlling the waterways and the mouths of the Nile rather than by occupying the Delta, and apart from a fruitless later attempt by Amyrtaeus it stayed quiet for the rest of the reign.^[2]

The general who saved Egypt for the king is also the hero of the reign's most novelistic story. Ctesias devotes a long stretch of his Persica to Megabyzus, a nobleman descended from one of the conspirators of 522 and married to a daughter of Xerxes, and the tale must be read through that frame.^[9] According to it, the queen mother Amestris demanded vengeance for her son Achaemenes, killed in the Delta, and after five years had Inaros and fifty captured Greeks crucified in breach of the terms Megabyzus had granted them. Megabyzus, disgraced by the broken faith, withdrew to Syria and seceded, routed two royal armies sent against him, was reconciled to the king, and later fell from favour, was exiled to the Persian Gulf, escaped, and was restored.^[2]

How much of this is history is hard to say. The narrative runs on stock motifs, the lion hunt in particular: Megabyzus is said to have been condemned for killing a lion that the king had reserved for himself, a scene that belongs outside historical time.^[2] Llewellyn-Jones and Robson suggest the anecdote encodes something real about political ambition, since to appropriate the image of the royal lion-slayer was to reach for the throne itself.^[9] Yet the saga is not pure invention. It introduces men, Menostanes and Artarius among them, whose existence is confirmed by the Babylonian tablets, so that a genuine great-family history of tension between the crown and a powerful aristocratic line survives inside the court romance.^[2] The safest reading takes the shape of the story, a mighty subject twice at odds with his king and twice reconciled, without trusting its colour.

The most argued question of the reign is whether it ended the war with Athens by treaty. After the Athenian defeat in Egypt and a further clash off Cyprus, the two powers are said to have reached an agreement, negotiated for Athens by Callias son of Hipponicus and dated by most who accept it to about 449. Diodorus gives its terms.

All the Greek cities of Asia are to live under laws of their own making; the satraps of the Persians are not to come nearer to the sea than a three days' journey and no Persian warship is to sail inside of Phaselis or the Cyanean Rocks … and if these terms are observed by the king and his generals, the Athenians are not to send troops into the territory over which the king is ruler.

Diodorus Siculus 12.4, in Brosius's translation^[10]

The difficulty is the evidence. The literature asserting the treaty is fourth-century, a century after the event and rich in error, while Thucydides, the contemporary who narrates these years, says nothing of any peace at all.^[2] The strongest case for it rests on the relative coherence of the later sources and on the plain fact that both king and city had reason to settle after their losses.^[2] The strongest case against was already made in antiquity: the historian Theopompus declared the document a forgery, Thucydides ignores it, and the historian Callisthenes, whom Plutarch cites, described the king keeping his ships away from the Greek sea without invoking any treaty at all.^[2] Each argument can be turned on its head, and no proof is decisive.^[2] The earliest notice bearing on it is Herodotus's, who records, without dating it, that Callias son of Hipponicus was at Susa 'about some other business' when Argive envoys were also at the court, a passage that puts an embassy of Callias to Artaxerxes in the tradition but attaches it to no treaty.^[8]

Briant proposes a mediating reading. If there was a settlement, it was less an Athenian triumph than an arrangement in fact between the generals and satraps, and from the Persian side it looks like a Peace of the King: the crown never renounced its rights over Asia Minor or its tribute, and the autonomy clause the Greeks celebrated could be read as a Persian lever against Athenian control of the same cities.^[2] Brosius likewise stresses that the terms preserved for the king exactly what he had wanted, control of Ionia and its revenues, so that the agreement, if real, cost Persia little.^[11] The question of whether a formal Peace of Callias was ever concluded remains open, and is likely to stay so.

Under an Artaxerxes the small province of Judah was refounded around its temple and its rebuilt capital, in the episodes the books of Ezra and Nehemiah preserve. Nehemiah, cupbearer to the king, was sent to Jerusalem and served as governor, rebuilding the city walls; his mission is dated with some confidence to 445, the twentieth year of Artaxerxes I, an identification that turns on Sanballat, the governor of Samaria who appears both in Nehemiah and in the Elephantine papyri around 410.^[1] Ezra, the priest and scribe charged with the Law, is harder to place. His mission is dated to the king's seventh year, traditionally taken as Artaxerxes I and so 458, but the same regnal figure would fit Artaxerxes II and a date of 398, and the order of the two men has been argued both ways.^[11][1] The historicity of Ezra himself has been doubted outright by some scholars, and the biblical narratives, shaped for later religious purposes, sit uneasily as historical sources.^[1] What is not in doubt is the policy they reflect: a Persian interest in a loyal, fortified Judah astride the road to Egypt, restored and organised much as the empire dealt with other subject communities.

Artaxerxes built, but modestly, and mostly finished what his father had begun. The Persepolis tablets show construction continuing on the terrace into the 460s and 450s, and his own inscriptions claim the completion of Xerxes's unfinished works, among them the Hall of a Hundred Columns.^[2]

This palace, king Xerxes my father set its foundations; with the protection of Auramazda, I, king Artaxerxes, built and completed it.

Artaxerxes I, A¹Pb (Babylonian foundation text)^[12]

The reliefs of his buildings repeat the forms and messages of his predecessors with a few changes: the procession of tribute-bearers on the stair of Palace H shows more delegations than before, and the audience scene no longer places the crown prince behind the enthroned king. Attempts to read a political programme into these shifts run into the ordinary uncertainties of interpreting the sculpture, and Briant warns against building much on them.^[2] His tomb was cut in the cliff at Naqsh-e Rostam beside those of his forebears, though which of the four royal tombs there is his cannot be fixed with certainty. One class of evidence once assigned to him has fallen away: four silver bowls inscribed with his name, sometimes cited as personal objects of the reign, are now recognised as modern forgeries, betrayed by a spelling of the word for silver that back-translates the later Persian sīm.^[1] The genuine epigraphy of the reign is therefore slight, a handful of formulaic building texts, which is one reason the reign is so much less visible than his father's.

What the inscriptions do not supply, the archives do. The reign is one of the better-documented stretches of the fifth century in Babylonia and Egypt, and the picture is of an administration running in good order. The Murašû papers from Nippur show a dense system of land grants held by soldier-colonists in return for military and tax service, managed through Babylonian intermediaries, the ordinary machinery of an empire that worked.^[1] The apparent thinning of the Babylonian record after 484 is now understood not as a symptom of Artaxerxes's reign but as the shadow of his father's reprisals, the so-called end of archives that closed many older family businesses; where documentation continues, it shows no rupture, and the very title 'king of Babylon' is attested as late as the king's twenty-fourth year.^[2] In Egypt the correspondence of the satrap Aršama and the records of the Elephantine garrison document a functioning provincial government through the decades after Inaros. The empire that the Greek sources present chiefly through defeats and court murders appears in its own paperwork as stable and administratively continuous.

The reign is also the point at which the Greek image of the Persian court, the closed world of eunuchs, concubines and scheming queens, takes firm hold, largely through Ctesias, who as a physician to a later king claimed the access of an insider.^[9] The women of Artaxerxes's family are prominent in his pages. Amestris, the widow of Xerxes and mother of the king, appears as the driving force behind the crucifixion of Inaros and the fifty Greeks, exacting vengeance for her son Achaemenes years after his death and against the terms Megabyzus had given.^[2] The daughters and wives move through the Megabyzus saga as agents of favour and disgrace. Read at face value, this is the harem politics that the Greek tradition made a fixture of its Persia.

The documentary evidence tempers the portrait without erasing it. Royal and noble women in the fifth-century tablets appear as holders and managers of substantial estates in their own right, with their own staffs and revenues, figures of real economic weight rather than sequestered intriguers; Parysatis, the wife of the next king, is attested owning land in Babylonia.^[1] The women acted within the rules of the court, and their power, where they had it, was of the ordinary dynastic kind, over marriages, patronage and the succession, not the melodramatic sort the novellas supply. The court that produced the vengeance of Amestris is the same court whose queens ran estates and whose administration the Babylonian archives show working steadily through the reign.

Artaxerxes died late in 424, in the same days as his wife Damaspia, after forty-one years on the throne. His death opened a violent contest among his sons that the long reign had not resolved. Xerxes II, his only son by Damaspia and so the legitimate heir, was murdered after forty-five days by his half-brother Sogdianus (Secyndianus in Ctesias), who held the throne some months before being overthrown in turn by another half-brother, Ochus, the satrap of Hyrcania, who took the throne-name Darius II.^[9][11] The trouble lay partly in descent: Xerxes II excepted, the contending sons were born of Babylonian secondary wives rather than a Persian queen, and the Greek sources fasten the epithet nothos, bastard, on the eventual winner.^[11] The Babylonian tablets track the confusion precisely, recording Artaxerxes's death around December 424 and Ochus recognised as Darius II by February 423. The mechanics of these transitions, and how far the dynasty depended on producing an undisputed heir, belong to the wider account of the succession (see the Achaemenid dynasty). The immediate lesson of 424 is how quickly a stable reign could give way, at the one point the system never mastered, the passage of the crown.

The standard image of Artaxerxes's reign, and of the fifth century after Xerxes, is one of a great power past its peak, and much of that image was constructed later. The narrative of Achaemenid decadence descends from the fourth-century Greek sources and from a modern historiography that read the empire's fall under Alexander back into its middle years; Briant has shown how the sources' relative silence on the reign was itself taken as proof of weakness, when it reflects only the loss of a narrator of Herodotus's range.^[2] Measured by what the reign actually did, the case for decline is weak. The king held the empire together through a family war at his accession, a serious foreign-backed revolt in Egypt, and a long confrontation with Athens, lost none of the core of the empire, and passed on a state that endured another century. The one durable loss, the withdrawal of the Aegean satraps from direct interference in the Greek cities of the coast, was a limited retrenchment on a distant frontier, not a wound to the empire's heart, and it was accompanied by a Persian re-entry into Greek politics as paymaster and arbiter that would grow through the following century. The satraps of Sardis and Dascylium were already, by the end of the reign, working the divisions among the Greeks to the king's advantage, the method that would make the Great King the eventual referee of the Peloponnesian War.^[2] The forty-one years of Artaxerxes I are, in the documents if not in the drama, among the most settled of the dynasty, and the reputation for gentleness the Greeks gave him may record, beneath the topos, a reign that simply governed.